Poetry Thursday - Sarton

Photography Credit: "Man-Made Mist" by Terry Beebe

Now I Become Myself
Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
~May Sarton~

Portrait of May Sarton, 1936, Polly Thayer Starr, Oil on Canvas,
Courtesy of Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

May Sarton, 1912-1995, was a prolific writer of poetry, novels, memoirs, and journals, publishing over 50 books during her lifetime. Journal of a Solitude was her most popular journal, but I received the most pleasure and personal comfort from reading The House By the Sea. Sarton lived the last 20 years of her life in York, Maine, in a house overlooking the sea. She and I corresponded from the summer of 1986 until shortly before her death
on July 16, 1995.

Her books and her personal notes to me remain immensely fulfilling,
especially during times of struggle and challenge.
May is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.